New Windows 10 Stats Show Microsoft Closely Watching You

   NEW WINDOWS 10 STATS SHOW MICROSOFT       CLOSELY WATCHING YOU

 

 

TEHRAN (FNA)- Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi has published a new blog post discussing various aspects of Windows 10 adoption and how quickly the OS is being adopted. According to Mehdi, Windows 10 adoption is tracking nearly 140% faster than Windows 7 and nearly 4x faster than Windows 8. 

 

The post also makes reference to some specific application and usage information, however, and the specificity of the disclosures has made some tech publications uneasy.

 

Specifically, Mehdi states:

Over 44.5 billion minutes spent in Microsoft Edge across Windows 10 devices in just the last month.
 

Over 2.5 billion questions asked of Cortana since launch.
 

Around 30% more Bing search queries per Windows 10 device versus prior versions of Windows.
 

Over 82 billion photos viewed within the Windows 10 Photo app.
 

Gaming continues to grow on Windows 10 – in 2015, gamers spent over 4 billion hours playing PC games on Windows 10. Gamers have streamed more than 6.6 million hours of Xbox One games to Windows 10 PCs.

It’s easy to see why this bothers some people. It’s not just that Microsoft is monitoring how many people have installed its new operating system. It’s also tracking how much people use Edge (or, presumably, other browsers), how often they use Cortana, when they game, and which installed applications they run. It also knows if you stream a title from your Xbox One to your PC, though the data actually suggests this is a fairly niche feature, given the Xbox One’s install base.

Ed Bott takes a different tack

Over at ZDNet, Ed Bott has taken a different tack. He decries the privacy concerns surrounding Windows 10 as ginned up by “dedicated Microsoft haters and clueless writers who make a living with breathless clickbait.”

As Bott points out, this kind of telemetry collection is now standard for both Microsoft and Apple. Google is known to track far more than either of the other two companies; if you use an Android device, Google essentially tracks every time you fart. He argues that Microsoft’s data collection is anonymized — though the value of such anonymity is highly questionable, given the ease with which the veil of anonymity can historically be pierced — and notes that modern websites and social media also collect enormous amounts of data.

All of this is true, and yet, it largely misses the point. The problem with Windows 10 is that Microsoft transformed tracking from an opt-in behavior (Windows 7) to a mandatory feature that non-enterprise customers can’t opt out of.

I also dislike the fact that the operating system sends Start Menu search data to Microsoft even if Cortana is disabled and the Start Menu is configured for local searching only. Windows 10 doesn’t just collect more information than previous versions. It makes it more difficult to prevent that data from being collected in the first place.

The problem with yelling “Microsoft is fine because everybody else does it, too!” is that it sets no firm boundaries on what should or shouldn’t be acceptable behavior. For years, companies defended vacuuming up customer data by claiming that they anonymized it. 

In the past six months, we’ve seen several companies drop the pretense and announce that henceforth, they won’t bother anonymizing data at all. Verizon is going to sell your personal information. Vizio was selling customer data whether you actually agreed to it or not. We’ve already seen examples of how shifting trends lead to business decisions that were unthinkable breaches of privacy 15 years ago. If Verizon and Vizio get away with what they’re doing, other companies will follow suit.

Prior to these changes, there were people who preferred Microsoft’s policies on such matters precisely because the company didn’t collect the same amount of data as other Silicon Valley corporations. I don’t know how many users would pay for a version of Windows 10 that stripped out and disabled the tracking that Microsoft now uses, but I know I’d happily purchase a retail copy with such features rather than taking the free upgrade I’m eligible for.

The problem here is simple: Instead of staking a bet on conspicuously not hoovering up user information, Microsoft chose to ape the practices of other companies. Wishing the company had made a different set of decisions doesn’t make a person a “dedicated Microsoft hater.”

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